The Boldt Decision: The Tribes Win Half

On February twelfth, nineteen seventy-four, federal judge George Boldt issued one of the most consequential rulings in the history of American Indian law. He had spent weeks reading the eighteen fifty-five treaty negotiations with an unusual degree of precision, paying attention not to what officials had summarized afterward but to what the treaty language actually said. When the treaty tribes reserved the right to fish at their usual and accustomed places, Boldt held, they had reserved fifty percent of the harvestable fish.

The ruling in United States versus Washington sent shock through the commercial and sport fishing industries of the entire Pacific Northwest. The state of Washington's enforcement agencies were openly hostile. Non-treaty fishermen defied the ruling. Boats were sabotaged. Officials dragged their feet on implementation. Fish and Wildlife officers who tried to enforce Boldt faced resistance from within state government.

The Supreme Court upheld Boldt's decision in nineteen seventy-nine, six to three.

What Boldt had done was read the treaty. The principle he restored, that the tribes had a legal right to fifty percent of the fish in their treaty-ceded waters, was not a new idea. It had been in the treaty since eighteen fifty-five. It had simply been ignored for one hundred nineteen years, through the construction of dams that blocked salmon runs, through the drowning of Celilo Falls, through the drastic decline of every major Columbia River salmon species. The treaty language had not changed. The fish population had.

The Boldt Decision did not restore Celilo Falls. It did not undo the dams. It restored a legal principle, and it gave the treaty tribes a lever that had always belonged to them. The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, founded in the wake of Boldt, is today the primary institution coordinating salmon restoration on the Columbia. They are still fishing, and still fighting.